The ultimate musician’s blog – Part 2: Tweaking

It’s only been a couple of days since I launched the revamped ihatemornings.com but already I’ve made some serious changes, and am planning several more. I want to document the progress so that once it’s all perfect I can collate all the hints, tips and experience in a handy guide. For now I’ll just link from one article to the next. If you haven’t already read my plan for the ultimate musician’s blog, you should. ;o)

h3. Eventful gig listings

Having booked a last minute gig at the weekend, I needed to get some gig listings happening pretty quickly. I already had an account with Eventful, and they handily provide their widget as an XHTML Microformat, so I could easily style it to match the theme of the site. I set up an ‘Upcoming gigs’ calendar on Eventful, and now if I need to add a gig to the listing on my website I just add it to that calendar. Sometimes the events will have been created already, and sometimes I will have to create them. Most of the venues in Oxford already have profiles on Eventful, so it’s pretty easy to add a gig. The advantage over manually entering the gigs on my site is that the Eventful listings can sync with Upcoming.org and other event sites and I can subscribe to my ‘Upcoming gigs’ calendar in iCal, saving me more redundant data entry.

h3. Google Analytics

I realised that I had lost my Google Analytics reporting with the new Wordpress install. After a bit of hunting I found the Google Analytics For Wordpress plugin, which gave me back my stats and more. It also allows you to use Analytics to track outbound links and downloads. The setup was pretty easy, and I’ll see how it works out after a couple of weeks of data collection.

h3. Google Sitemap

My old site also had a Google sitemap that made sure that Google was indexing all the pages properly. Another WP plugin sorted that out for me, with only a couple of permission tweaks to get it working.

h3. META tags

The Google work reminded me that I needed to sort out my META tags (keywords, description, page titles etc.), and luckily there’s a plugin that does all that too! All in One SEO Pack rewrites all your page titles, creates page descriptions from your article extracts and creates keywords from your tags. A one-click install that saved hours of fiddling, now and in the future.

h3. Wordpress comment spam

Feeling very pleased with myself I went to check my email, only to discover 3 spam comments had been posted on my shiny new blog. Damn. I read Wordpress’ useful page on Combating comment spam, and opted for the WP-SpamFree plugin, which claims to shoot down >95% of spam ‘at the door’. That sounds pretty exciting. I’ll let you know how it goes…

h3. FeedBurner

Not long after that, I was catching up on my RSS feeds in Google Reader, and came across my latest article. Or at least a 3 line excerpt with some ugly image tags in it. Blast. I logged in to FeedBurner and changed the feed address to “ihatemornings.com/feed” instead of “ihatemornings.com/rss” (the Textpattern default) and updated the Wordpress settings to include the full text of each article in the feed. I hate feeds of article excerpts. I never bother the click the ‘read more…’ links. Too much hassle.

h3. ShareThis

The ShareThis plugin neatly added social bookmarking and sharing links to the end of each post without any configuration. And that’s probably enough tweaking for one day… ;o)

h3. Still to come

Next up I need to:

• Update my Myspace page
• Create a Facebook Page
• Write a new About page for ihatemornings.com
• Figure out which songs to feature and where
• Populate ReverbNation with some useful stuff
• Migrate my mailing list from CampaignMonitor to ReverbNation
• Book some more gigs
• Write 40 more songs

Easy, eh? Watch this space, and feel free to give me any tips in the comments… ;o)

Tagged with: blogging, ihatemornings.com, social media

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